Twisters Kill 2 Maryland Students

Tornadoes ripped across the Washington region Monday afternoon, killing two students and injuring about 50 at the University of Maryland campus in College Park. The twisters splintered tall trees, overturned automobiles and tore the roofs from stores and houses from Culpeper, Va., to Laurel, Md.

The deadly tornadoes, unusual in the region, appeared to be the most destructive such storms to hit in about 75 years.

The storm system swept across Maryland into Pennsylvania, where high winds later forced dozens of people from their homes into Red Cross shelters in York County, 80 miles west of Philadelphia. Local officials reported two unconfirmed tornado sightings.

The high winds were followed by heavy rains.

“We’re getting a lot of flooding now, so there are reports across the area of people having to be rescued from cars stranded in flash floods, even in the city of York,” said Patrick McFadden, executive director of the York County Emergency Management Agency.

The Maryland deaths occurred about 5:45 p.m., near the campus football stadium, when an automobile was picked up by the fierce winds and flung against some trees, killing both occupants, a Prince George’s County Fire Department spokesman said. The names of the two women were not immediately released.

Maryland students and staff members gaped and cowered as the storm suddenly approached, overturning more than a dozen cars in a single spot, smashing trailers used for a fire training academy, breaking windows in the new Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and forcing the evacuation of three high-rise dormitories.

“Everywhere you look, there’s some type of destruction,” said Mark Brady, spokesman for the Prince George’s fire and rescue service, as he stood on the debris-littered campus. “It’s pretty unbelievable.”

The most seriously injured person, a man about 35 who was pulled from the temporary building that housed the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute, was reported in stable condition Monday night at Prince George’s Hospital Center, according to a spokeswoman there.

About a dozen students were taken from the campus to Washington Adventist Hospital, mostly suffering from cuts and bruises.

Temporary shelters were set up in a campus dining hall, the student union building and a recreation center. Today’s classes for the university’s 32,000 students were canceled.

A National Weather Service forecaster confirmed that the damage was caused by two twisters. One dropped out of the clouds in Culpeper, Va., and headed northeast to the Fauquier-Loudoun County border.

The second, according to forecaster Jim Travers, began in Spotsylvania County and went through Fairfax and Arlington counties before crossing the Potomac River, brushing the District of Columbia and entering Maryland.

The twisters, which raged across the region for well over an hour, were apparently created by the clash of an arriving cold front with warm and humid air over the area.